Yet despite the growing number of California voters signing up to get all their ballots by mail and few signs that anyone is worried or unhappy about the vote-by-mail trend, Sacramento politicians are treating attempts to boost the use of mail ballots as a ticking time bomb threatening the state’s future.

It’s not that legislators aren’t willing to make changes, exactly. But they are going to make darn sure that even the most innocuous measures don’t move ahead without plenty of opportunities to blow them up.

Actually, pitiful might be too generous a description. In December, Sebastian Ridley-Thomas won a vacant Los Angeles-area Assembly seat in a special election where the turnout was a snappy 8.5 percent. Gonzalez, one of the sponsors of the Assembly bill, won her own seat last year in a special election where fewer than 15 percent of registered voters cast ballots.

An election that’s cheaper, faster and more popular with voters, so what’s not to like?

Well, plenty, for some legislators. The bill passed out of the Assembly Thursday on a 44-32 vote, but only after the authors agreed to amend it to require 10 times the very truncated number of polling places they originally called for, which kind of destroys the all-mail idea. They also were forced to put a 2020 sunset date on the bill, meaning the whole fight could start all over again in six years.

It now goes to the state Senate, where what will happen is anyone’s guess.

Even the smallest experiments with all-mail voting have had their problems. In 2009, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have allowed Yolo and Santa Clara counties to conduct three local elections by mail and then report on how well the process worked. Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar measure with only Yolo County in 2010, arguing that “poor, elderly and disabled voters would not have a sufficient opportunity to vote.”

You know, the poor, elderly and disabled voters who generally have the hardest time getting to the polls on election day.

Yolo County finally got the OK for its experiment in 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill. Now Mullin has his own measure, AB 2028, to allow San Mateo County to join Yolo County in the test.

It passed the Assembly last month on a 51-23 vote and also is awaiting action in the state Senate.

It’s not as though vote-by-mail is a new idea. Alpine (776 registered voters) and Sierra (2,209) counties already run all their elections by mail. Oregon, with its 2.16 million voters, has been all-mail since 1998 with almost no problems and Washington, with 3.9 million voters, also has dumped its polling places.

With the notable exception of Los Angeles, California’s 10 largest counties already have more than 42 percent of their voters on the permanent vote-by-mail list. Those numbers get larger with each new election.

Voters who avoided the local polling place by filling out their ballots from the comfort of their living rooms are expected to be a huge majority Tuesday. They’ve already voted with their stamps about how they prefer to cast a ballot. Now the Legislature gets to decide whether members want to drag their heels or lead the parade.